Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature

(Michael S) #1

daughter, Raven’s mother rejects her culture to
protect her son. The unattractive Tillo with no
future joins the handsome Raven with no past so
that together they may have the present. Eventu-
ally, Raven’s love for Tillo allows her to emerge
from her isolation.
With her newfound strength, Raven ventures
out of the safety of her store into the New World
of her adopted land on the day it is literally frac-
tured by an earthquake. Raven begs Tillo to dis-
card this fractured world for the safety of the past,
but Tillo chooses to straddle the gulf dividing the
old and the new worlds. She chooses to extend her
healing services to members of the New World
and concurrently creates a sense of self in rela-
tionship with others through service in America.
Tillo’s final incarnation into Maya, a strong and
beautiful woman, becomes possible through the
fusion of her Indian self with her American mi-
lieu. Whereas her earlier stages of self-evolvement
were all defined by her ability to give to others, her
final evolution into Maya reflects her new humil-
ity to receive love that has been denied to her all
her life.


Bibliography
Vega-Gonzalez, Susana. “Negotiating Boundaries in
Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices.” Compara-
tive Literature and Culture 5, no 2 (June 2003):
Available online. URL: http://clcwebjournal.lib.
purdue.edu/clcweb03-2/vega-gonzalez03.html.
Downloaded on September 23, 2004.
Rajan, Gita. “Chitra Divakaruni’s The Mistress of
Spices.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnation-
alism 2, no. 2 (2002): 215–236.
Sukanya B. Senapati


Mochizuki, Ken (1954– )
A third-generation Japanese American, Ken Mo-
chizuki is a Seattle native who holds a B.A. in com-
munications from the University of Washington.
Before becoming a writer of books for children
and young adults, Mochizuki worked as an actor
for five years and as a journalist at Seattle’s Interna-
tional Examiner and Northwest Nikkei for 10 years.


Baseball Saved Us (1993), a picture book illus-
trated by Dom Lee, is written from the viewpoint
of a Japanese-American boy living in an intern-
ment camp. The narrator’s father sees the need to
divert the internees’ attention away from the ter-
rible camp conditions, so adults and children work
together to construct a baseball field. Although the
narrator is not a good player, he improves as time
passes, and finally hits a game-winning home run.
However, upon returning from the camp, the nar-
rator is shunned by his classmates. When baseball
season arrives, he becomes acutely aware that he
looks different from the other team members.
With the angry crowd shouting out racial slurs, the
narrator draws strength from his supportive team-
mates and hits another home run.
Mochizuki and Lee also collaborated on He-
roes (1995), dedicated to the 50,000 U.S. soldiers
of Asian/Pacific Islander descent who fought in
World War II. Whenever young Donnie Okada
plays war with his friends, he has to be the bad guy
because he looks like “them.” Donnie insists that
his father and uncle fought for the United States in
Europe and Korea, but his friends cannot believe
that Asian Americans could have been part of “our
army.” Donnie races home in tears. To pick Don-
nie up after school the next day, Mr. Okada wears a
veteran’s cap with numerous medals pinned to it,
and Uncle Yosh appears in full uniform with med-
als that look “like the top of an open crayon box.”
Uncle Yosh throws a football to Donnie, and the
other children, deeply impressed, follow him to
the field to play football.
Mochizuki and Lee’s most famous effort is Pas-
sage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story (1997). It tells
the tale of Chiune Sugihara, the so-called Japanese
Schindler, through the eyes of Sugihara’s five-year-
old son. While serving as Japanese consul to Lithu-
ania in 1940, the elder Sugihara, acting in defiance
of his government, wrote thousands of visas for
Polish Jews that enabled them to escape the Nazis.
Sugihara tirelessly handwrote visas until he was
reassigned, continuing to write even at a hotel and
a train station. The consequences of Sugihara’s ac-
tions, reported in an afterword by Sugihara’s real
son, Hiroki, consisted of an 18-month internment
in a Soviet camp and the revocation of his diplo-

196 Mochizuki, Ken

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